page_title: Vinland map
section_title: Possible source identifications, 2013
hierarchical_section_title: Vinland map / History / Possible source identifications, 2013
caption_attribution_description: English: The Cantino planisphere, completed by un unknown Portuguese cartographer in 1502, is one of the most precious cartographic monuments of all times. It depicts the world, as it became known to the European after the great exploration voyages of the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century to the Americas, Africa and India. It is now kept in the Biblioteca Universitaria Estense, Modena, Italy Deutsch: Die Cantino-Planisphäre zeigt die den Europäern zu Beginn des 16. Jh. bekannte Welt. Sie wird heute in der Biblioteca Universitaria Estense in Modena, Italien aufbewahrt.
context_page_description: The Vinland map is claimed to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America. It became well-known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland.
  The map describes this region as having been visited by Europeans in the 11th century. Although it was presented to the world in 1965 with an accompanying scholarly book written by British Museum and Yale University librarians, historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available, and chemical analyses have identified one of the major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment. Individual pieces of evidence continue to be challenged, most recently at a 2009 conference.
context_section_description: In June 2013, it was reported in the British press that a Scottish researcher, John Paul Floyd, claimed to have discovered two pre-1957 references to the Yale Speculum and Tartar Relation manuscripts which shed significant light on the provenance of the documents.  According to one of these sources (an exhibition catalogue), a 15th-century manuscript volume containing books 21-24 of the Speculum Historiale and C. de Bridia's Historia Tartarorum featured among the many items loaned by the Archdiocese of Zaragoza for display at the 1892-93 Exposición Histórico-Europea (an event held in Madrid, Spain to commemorate the voyages of Columbus). Floyd noted that Spanish priest and scholar Cristóbal Pérez Pastor also reported having seen such a codex, in historical notes organised and published posthumously in 1926. Neither the catalogue entry nor Pérez Pastor's description mentions the presence of a map. It is known that Enzo Ferrajoli, who offered the Vinland manuscript for sale in 1957, was convicted of having stolen manuscripts from the Cathedral Library of La Seo, Zaragoza, in the 1950s. Floyd also contends that the creator of the Vinland map must have made use of an 18th-century engraving of the 1436 Bianco map by Vincenzio Formaleoni (1752–97), since the Vinland map appears to reproduce several of Formaleoni's copying errors.
caption: The Cantino planisphere (1502), which was the first world map to show the Americas separate from Asia
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